UK Take-Home Pay Calculator

Start with your gross salary, subtract your Personal Allowance to get taxable income, then apply Income Tax at 20%, 40% or 45% depending on which band each portion falls into (Scotland uses six bands instead of three). Separately, National Insurance is charged at 8% on earnings between £12,570 and £50,270, and 2% above that. Subtract Income Tax, National Insurance and any student loan repayment from your gross salary, and what's left is your take-home pay.

Gross pay is your salary before anything is deducted. Take-home pay, also called net pay, is what actually lands in your bank account after Income Tax, National Insurance and any other deductions such as a student loan repayment or pension contribution. For most people on a typical UK salary, take-home pay works out to somewhere between 70% and 85% of gross pay.

There are 12 monthly pay periods, 13 four-weekly pay periods, and 52 weekly pay periods in a year. This is the same convention HMRC uses for PAYE tax tables, and it's why this calculator uses those exact figures to convert between an annual salary and a monthly, four-weekly or weekly amount.

Because 13 four-weekly periods don't divide evenly across 12 calendar months, most months contain one payday, but a couple of months each year end up with two. Your total annual pay is the same either way; it's just distributed differently across the calendar than monthly pay is. If your take-home pay per payday looks lower than a colleague paid monthly on the same salary, that's usually why: four-weekly pay is spread over 13 paydays instead of 12.

It depends on how much of your income falls into each Income Tax band. The first £12,570 is tax-free, the next portion up to £50,270 is taxed at 20% in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, then 40% up to £125,140, and 45% above that. Scotland's bands are different, shown further down this page. Enter your own salary in the calculator above for an exact figure rather than a rough estimate.

Not in this version. It covers Income Tax, National Insurance and student loan deductions on a straightforward salary. If you're contributing to a workplace pension through salary sacrifice, use the salary sacrifice calculator instead, since that changes your taxable and NIable pay in a way this calculator doesn't model.

There's no fixed benchmark, since it depends entirely on your income level. Someone earning below the Personal Allowance keeps 100% of their gross pay; a basic-rate taxpayer typically keeps around 80 to 85%; and someone paying the 40% or 45% rate on part of their income keeps a lower percentage overall, even though their take-home amount is still much higher in cash terms. The calculator above shows your own take-home percentage next to the figures.

If you select a student loan plan, 9% of your income above that plan's repayment threshold is deducted alongside Income Tax and National Insurance (6% for a Postgraduate Loan, above its own lower threshold). It comes straight out of your pay automatically through PAYE, so it's already reflected in the take-home figures this calculator shows you.

Yes, because Scotland has its own Income Tax bands and rates, six of them instead of the three used in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. National Insurance, student loan rules and the Personal Allowance are the same across the whole of the UK. Select "Scotland" as your tax region in the calculator above for an accurate result.